The Goat Lady vs. Goliath

Checking the herds

Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune

Leslie Cooperband, 50, checks on goats herds grazing on her farm located on the edge of Champaign on Tuesday, May 4, 2010. The Prairie Fruit Farm & Creamery is bordering a proposed roadway, a project opposed by local farmers.

Leslie Cooperband, 50, checks on goats herds grazing on her farm located on the edge of Champaign on Tuesday, May 4, 2010. The Prairie Fruit Farm & Creamery is bordering a proposed roadway, a project opposed by local farmers. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)

CHAMPAIGN — On an otherwise enchanting spring morning — with hundreds of blackberry brambles being tucked into dark-chocolate soils just beyond the orchard, and endless trays of chevre being scooped out of a vat into waiting tubs in the cheeserie — Leslie Cooperband is up to her elbows in goat.

No, really.

Chippy, the mama goat with "the winningest personality," is writhing on a bed of hay in the barn, deep in the pains of labor. And clearly in trouble.

Seems the kid she's trying to push out has twisted its neck, and the poor thing can't budge through the birth canal.

Certainly not without major assist from Cooperband, who has slipped out of her sterile, white, cheesemaking lab coat and into navy-blue coveralls and over-the-elbow, clear plastic, obstetric gloves. She has squirted half a bottle of rust-colored germ-killer and just as much lubricant half up the gloves and plunged in her arms, up to the elbows, to try to give Chippy half a chance at getting the kid out alive. For a hold-your-breath stretch of 32 minutes (an eternity in a birthing barn), she alternately twists and tugs, soothes and swears.

At long last, the 8-pound, 2-ounce buck emerges, floppy but plenty alive. Mama and brown-spattered son rejoice in a mad scramble of licking, a swirl of pink tongues and wet, sloppy goat.

"I've become a goat midwife," says Cooperband.

Good thing. For the goats, and their sweet brand of milk, are at the heart of the award-winning Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery, Illinois' first farmstead fromagerie. Cooperband owns the farm with her husband, Wes Jarrell.

And, dang, if this parcel of paradise doesn't stand to be steamrolled should Urbana City Hall complete a ring road that has been on and off the books for the last half-century.

This is no mere saga of a few endangered farms. Nor simply a wail for the loss of 85 acres of the world's richest farmland.

This boils down to a battle for urban-fringe farming in a nation just beginning to shift its focus away from decades-old sprawl and toward the preservation of land for local food sourcing. And it extends beyond this college metropolis.

Two lanes of asphalt, penciled straight through a field of alfalfa, are the least of it.

The road, called Olympian Drive and already partway there (it dead-ends in a cornfield not a mile and a quarter away), comes with a price tag of at least $30 million, depending when shovels sink into soil. The project had been shelved for some 13 years, until last summer when the scent of stimulus funds swept through the air, like hay from a hayloft.

The three-mile span would hitch up the ends of a ring around Champaign and Urbana. And it would cut in half the alfalfa field that feeds the Prairie Fruits goats, roll right past the patch of the farm where long tables are set for sumptuous feasts and bulldoze the bucolia that is the heart of the heartland.

"They'll destroy it in essence," says Cooperband, looking out through rows of Winesap apple trees to where the road would run. "People who come out here are stunned that this beauty exists here."

With a herd of some 80 dairy goats, just as many kids, an orchard, six vegetable plots, a fully equipped Grade A dairy, and state-of-the-art cheesemaking kitchen, it's easy to overlook the fact that Cooperband is a distinguished agronomist, and a composting expert besides.

She was a tenured professor of soil science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when she moved in 2003 onto the storybook farm, with its log cabin and wrap-around porch, just two miles north of Champaign and Urbana. Until March she was teaching in the extension program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Jarrell recently retired as a professor of natural resources and environmental science at U. of I.)

But now Cooperband has hung up her academic robes. Lately she's a round-the-clock goat herder, organic farmer and artisan cheesemaker.

By day, she tends the goats, a blithesome mob of floppy-eared Nubians and no-eared LaManchas; hand-crafts 12 different small-batch cheeses; and takes orders from upscale markets, organic groceries and five-star Chicago restaurants. By night, she keeps an ear out for those goats and juggles those orders, even plays local distributor, hopping in her Honda Civic Hybrid to drive that cheese wherever it needs to be.

On summer weekends, she works the farmers markets from Urbana to Oak Park, where folks wait in line to snatch up her Little Bloom on the Prairie (a creamy camembert-style cheese), her Moonglo (a raw milk, washed-rind tomme-style cheese) or, if you get there plenty early, her chevre with herbes de Provence (the rosemary, basil, lavender, thyme and marjoram all organically grown on her farm).

From May through December, she hosts five-course, locally sourced, organic farm dinners ("high-end rustic food," one of her kitchen staff calls it), served under the setting sun and evening stars that stretch across the wide central Illinois sky.

The acclaim spills way past the state line. Williams-Sonoma, no slouch in the fancy food department, showcased one of Prairie Fruits' goat cheeses in last year's holiday catalog, and Bon Appetit magazine singled out its fruits, its cheese and its farm dinners, making it the only Midwest cheesemaker to earn such a mention.

In recent months Cooperband has had to add one more chore to her long list of farm to-dos: She's fighting with all her brainpower — and a good dose of grass-roots banding together — the two-lane road that'll run just 50 yards south of where the farm dinners are served and through two other working family farms that date back to the Civil War.

She's up half the night writing commentaries for the local newspaper, posting appeals on the Internet, speaking out at city council meetings and various public hearings, and even sitting down one-on-one with decision makers, trying mightily to get the Powers That Be to understand just how wrong the road is.

"We're up against Goliath here," is the way 50-year-old Cooperband sees it.

Goliath in this case would be no less than the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission, the Champaign-Urbana Economic Development Council and the Champaign Chamber of Commerce. Oh, and the city of Urbana, too — specifically second-term Mayor Laurel Prussing, a regional economist by training who has been known to refer to Cooperband as simply "the Goat Lady."

The way the mayor and company see it, Olympian Drive is a road that has long been sketched into regional transportation plans and will relieve traffic, provide a bypass around Urbana and bring jobs, along with light industry, to the north end of town.

"First of all," said the mayor, in a recent telephone interview, "if it takes 60 years to get a road built, you're not exactly indulging in wild sprawl." The unfinished stretch of Olympian Drive, she says, is a gaping fill-in-the-blank. "If you look at a map, it's like a Pac-Man. The upper quadrant of road is missing.

"People who say we don't need roads anymore are not thinking straight," adds Prussing, who argues that she's every bit as environmental as the road's opponents, tracing her long green roots to 1971, when she was a founding member of HIPS, Housewives Interested in Pollution Solutions.

"If they want to go live someplace else and dig roots and pick berries," says the mayor, "they can go and live someplace else."

After all, says Prussing, it's "just 77 acres" that's slotted for road, though other estimates put the figure at about 85. "Nobody will be forced to stop farming."

True enough, but with two lanes of cars and trucks, tractors and combines slicing straight through the alfalfa field — speeding and spewing and spitting out road junk — Cooperband says, "It'll destroy the essence of the farm, ruin the rural nature, change the character forever.

"It feels like country out here," she muses, as she ladles snowy white curds out of a Dutch-made pasteurizer — a stainless-steel vat double the size of an old wringer washer — in the sterilized cheese room. "But we're just four minutes from the city."

It is that very proximity, the fact that they farm on the urban fringe, that puts them — and so many other last-stand farmers — in the surveyors' cross hairs.

Cooperband is but one of a new breed of thinkers who insist: "You shouldn't view agricultural land as a blank slate, idle and waiting for someone to come along and buy it. To put up houses or build an industrial park. There's this whole mindset that agriculture isn't a valid use of the land."

Fact is, that equation is already being shoved aside by plenty of folks, rural and urban, who argue that close-in farmland ought to be stamped super-ultra-prime.

They crunch the same numbers as Urbana's mayor and come up with quite another sum.

"I imagine in an area with an abundance of riches — with miles and miles of the world's best farmland — losing a little bit might not seem significant. But I think that's short-sighted. Which is why people who realize what's coming out of Prairie Fruits Farm might see it in a little different way," says Greg O'Neill, the owner of Pastoral, an artisan cheese shop in Chicago, the first to make room in its cheese case for Cooperband's chevre.

"These are not yeoman farmers. These are true Renaissance people," says O'Neill.

"Unconscionable," is how small-farms advocate Terra Brockman sees what would be the road's "rude intrusion of noise and cement and commerce" on the pastoral life of Prairie Fruits Farm and the other farms in or along its path.

"We know exactly what's at risk here because it's been happening since post- World War II with ring roads, then strip malls and then the housing developments. Or the big-box store with the parking lot. It's called development, but really it's sprawl," says Brockman, founder of The Land Connection, an Evanston-based nonprofit that preserves farmland, trains farmers and supports local food. "It's lost forever. They're never going to jackhammer the parking lot to rebuild the farmland."

The dark-chocolate soil of central Illinois ranks among the very best in the world, right up there with that of Ukraine and the pampas grasslands of Argentina.

Every year, records show, some 600 to 2,000 acres of this purebred earth in Champaign County are chewed up and spit back out by bulldozers and road-paving behemoths. According to the American Farmland Trust, which tracks these things, two acres of farmland are gobbled up every minute in this land-hungry nation. That amounts to slightly more than 1 million acres a year, or a plot of lost farmland as big as 1.3 Rhode Islands.

Illinois ranks fifth in the list of states surrendering farmland.

But the paradigm is shifting, and going forward we might not be so quick to binge on the nation's farmland, says Deanna Glosser, a Springfield-based planner who wrote a white paper on regional food planning for the American Planning Association in 2007.

As a nation, she writes, we are starting to grasp the implications of not preserving farmland, especially at the urban fringe. We're figuring out that food production is not endless, and it depends, in the end, on "protecting prime agricultural land."

It's that brand of forward-thinking that has propelled Cooperband to keep up her fight, despite the mud balls lobbed on her fields. Cooperband counts among her compatriots the multigenerational farmers to the east and west and south of her fields, the hundreds of locals who flock to the farm's Saturday breakfasts, big-city foodies and plenty of university folk.

They have an ally: Alan Kurtz, who doesn't just hold a seat on the Champaign County Board but is also vice chair of its environment and land use committee.

The way he sees it — and he researched the heck out of it — it's a $35 million road to nowhere, without ways to get on or off for the whole three-mile stretch. And frankly, he says, there's no money to pay for it, not in cash-strapped Illinois.

"We can't keep eating up our best fine farmland. We can't just willy-nilly gobble up more," says Kurtz, a native New Yorker who moved to Champaign 31 years ago.

"When was the last time you saw a parking lot on I-74?" he asks, of the interstate that edges north of the cities. "Try the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. Day and night, 24/7, it's bumper-to-bumper."

Kurtz says he was "inundated" by voters opposed to the road, nearly 200 e-mails, the"biggest response" to an issue since he was voted into office two years ago. He insists that moving ahead with the $5 million allocated for design and public engagement — as is the case after the Urbana and Champaign city councils recently unanimously approved such a move — is a "huge waste of dollars and time."

At least for now, Kurtz is not alone on the County Board in his opposition to the road. "That's why they pulled it from the agenda," he says. "They could sniff in the wind that we'd vote it down."

For her part, the mayor says, "I'm just waiting for the (farmers) to come back to me in 20 years, and thank me for this road that helped their business. I think it will."

Till then, the mayor plans to plow ahead. She's hoping for more funds from Washington and Springfield. And she'll wait till after November elections to see if a change of seats on the County Board will give her the critical nod.

Back on Prairie Fruits Farm, Cooperband as always has plenty on her cheese plate. She's mulling whether to get a vote on the ballot, put it to the people to decide whether that road should muck up the farm works. Come fall she'll beef up the troops, make sure to muster the vote for those who'll say nope to the road.

For now, with summer just the other side of the equinox, she's got nearly 700 hungry folks signed up for those "high-end rustic" farm dinners. And week after week she's due to handcraft and deliver almost 600 pounds of prize-winning cheese.

Oh, and then there are the goats. That twisty-necked kid, the one who nearly got stuck in ol' Chippy, he spends long days now chomping alfalfa, out where the road hasn't come.

"He's growin' like a weed," says the midwife professor, with more than a hint of pride.